The Twenty-Third Night of Halloween: The Nightmare

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Nightmare (2015), a documentary by Rodney Ascher. Ascher interviews eight people who have been visited by “shadow people” that freeze them in their beds, such that they are unable to speak or move. This has happened many times to each of them, over a number of years. For two of them, the visitations began when they were still in the crib. Less than half of the interviewees accept the scientific medical diagnosis for their condition: sleep paralysis. That is, sleep paralysis attended by hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations that can cause nightmare imagery to intrude into the waking world. The other interviewees, reluctant to accept this rational explanation, instead propose more idiosyncratic or paranormal etiologies, ranging from intruders from a parallel dimension to Biblical demons to the Zeta Reticulan gray aliens to (most interestingly) a psychically transmitted disease. 

There is no narration, only the interviews, which are intercut with dramatic reenactments illustrating the interviewees’ harrowing tales of nocturnal terror via low budget horror effects. There are also no expert talking heads, only the eight “experiencers.” So, all of the commentary from Ascher comes through the editing, in particular the crosscuts between interviews that are done to correlate similar (sometimes deceptively similar) elements from disparate accounts. There are some brief clips of horror movies, including the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Communion, and Jacob’s Ladder, but these are only shown when the interviewees themselves refer to these films and detail the similarities between certain scenes and their own encounters. Ostensibly, the reason we are given nothing more than these accounts and their accompanying illustrations, without any explanation or opining from an external source, is so that we may keep an open mind as to the true nature of shadow people. Really though, the possibility is left open that shadow people are more than psychological figments only so that Ascher may scare his audience. For, The Nightmare is as much a horror movie as it is a documentary. And I have no problem with that, particularly because there does not appear to be any fudging here, no fabricated evidence, such as we see in more exploitative “true horror” like Faces of Death (which are also great, in their own sideshow-flavored fashion). 

As a horror movie, The Nightmare succeeds best at conveying the bleak hell of being paralyzed and tormented by malevolent entities night after night, helpless to prevent these circadian ordeals. Also, one interviewee’s account of having his first episode after his girlfriend told him about her sleep paralysis, and how he passed it on to another friend after telling of his experience in turn, activates some Pleistocene-age alarm bell in the back of our brains—did we just catch this same nightmare affliction merely by learning about the shadow people??